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“You okay?” His voice was as strong and soothing as the hands he laid on her bare shoulders. His thumbs pressed into the knotted muscles astride her spine and circled slowly. How did he always know where to find her when she needed a distraction from her head?
Fe
eling exhausted from the wind up of the day, the efforts invested, Laine leaned back into his hands. She didn’t have it in her to haggle or argue. It was easier to just give in. “I’m fine. Frustrated. Connie’s going to tan my hide for this.”
Jason’s hands stopped moving at her neck. “Laine, Connie is a crusty old bat with a rawhide heart, but even she couldn’t object to this. The groom was giving it to a bridesmaid before the wedding. This would have been a marriage made in hell. It was doomed.”
“I know, but it’s my job to make the wedding happen. It’s my livelihood. My chosen career. If I’d been on my toes instead of screwing around with you—”
“Hey now, to my utter and eternal disappointment, there was no screwing going on. You were trying to make this cake materialize. The bride was better off finding out before the wedding. You can’t beat yourself up.”
So easy for him to be confident in the morality of the situation. He wasn’t the one debating over whether he would have been able to do the right thing and tell if the circumstances of discovery had been different. He wasn’t the one with a job on the line. Or a past haunting him.
“It’s my job, Jason, to make sure that weddings happen. Not to ensure the couple is a perfect fit. I’m not a matchmaker. I’m a wedding planner. I make it happen. I lose my job if I don’t.”
“You don’t need to get so worked up about this. It’s just a job. You lose it, I’ll hire you here. No biggie.” He reached out and scooped up one tiny bit of frosting and dotted it on her nose. “It’s out of your control. Loosen up.”
Loosen up? What in the hell? That was the final straw. Exasperated, Laine grabbed a solid handful of cake, spun on her stiletto and slung it into Jason’s stunned face.
Her satisfaction lasted only an instant before she sucked in her breath with the horror of knowing she’d made a potentially monumental mistake. Jason reached up and swiped the buttercream and cake off his face, taking a menacing step toward her.
Her hands shot up, palms out in a pacifying gesture. Shit, he looked like he meant business. “Okay, I’m sorry. Jason, I’m sorry, don’t—”
The wet glob of creamy frosting splattered across her face, and one chunk of cake rolled down off her nose and into her cleavage. She wanted to scream, be angry, but her cheeks were betraying her, the corners of her mouth defying gravity and her need to look mad.
Jason eyed the cake and then reached out and, with two fingers, swept the glob from between her breasts and popped it into his mouth. “Coconut,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.
She stared, wide-eyed. Dumbfounded by the affront. “You… you…” At a loss for words, she spun back for the cake and grabbed two fistfuls, ready to retaliate.
His strong hands clamped onto her arms. “Whoa, that’s enough.”
Tired of circumstances beyond her control, Laine decided to take destiny by the reins. The cake was going all over him. She pulled at his grip, twisted and…slipped from his grasp, launching face first into the second tier.
“Whoops,” came the muffled concession from behind her, sounding less than sincere.
Baked confection erupted from her mouth, sweet spongy goodness embedded down the cleavage of her dress, frosting, greasy and slick, smeared across the swells of her breasts and face. Her hands fisted tightly, and a strangled moan of fury erupted from her depths.
It must have sounded like pain, because in a flash Jason was by her side, trying to take her hand and pull her away from the destroyed desert. He wished.
Laine wrapped one hand around his wrist and planted her feet for the best leverage, all under the pretense of accepting his assistance, and then yanked back using everything she could muster to throw Jason into the cake behind her. He had to outweigh her by nearly a hundred pounds—she never would have gotten away with it but for the slick stretch of frosting smearing the carpet underfoot.
He toppled forward and, suddenly, Laine was going down with him, and, dear God, she was afraid he’d crush her. He spun around and, landing on his back, pulled her down on top of him. The cake cart shot forward, the cake itself collapsing underneath their bodies.
Eyes wide, Laine tried not to laugh as she stared down into Jason’s stern face. Bits of frosting and crumbs gave him a stuccoed complexion—so very not the perfectly groomed man she was accustomed to doing business with. Of course, that perfectly groomed man would never have his arm circled around her waist the way he did now, would never look at her with the smoldering stare that was suddenly setting her on fire.
Laine lay on top of him, her legs together in a stiff line along Jason’s body, her arms folded up under her breasts as some sort of defense against the hard planes of his muscular torso. He wore his clothes well, but lying on top of him gave her a new appreciation for what rippled beneath his Zenga suits.
She looked down at herself and felt her cheeks heat. Her breasts looked like giant frosted melons swelling up between them. Melons with berry garnish. Her nipples had popped completely free of the ruined gown and pointed up through a sheen of greasy frosting at Jason.
Slowly, she turned her gaze up to meet his. The look in his eyes left little question as to what he was thinking and nervous anticipation began to simmer within her. Suddenly, the arm around her waist tightened and Jason rolled them over so that Laine was underneath him, squishing into a pillow of desert for two-hundred-fifty. He pushed himself up on one arm, his hips resting against her, his legs tangled with her own, the hard bulge of his cock at her abdomen.
Heat pooled in her belly, and every nerve danced with an electric charge across the surface of her skin. Her lips parted, shallow breaths mingling between them. “You started it.” Her hushed words seemed to absorb all other sound around them.
Jason’s eyes narrowed inches above her. “I was trying to cheer you up.”
Biting her bottom lip, she gazed up at him. All she wanted was to run her frosting slicked fingers through the dark slash of straight hair falling across his brow, pull his face down to her and lick the buttercream off the strong lines of his jaw. She wanted him, but their relationship was based on little more than a mutual love of sparring. She didn’t know any other way to be with him. “You still started it.”
The solid columns of muscle that pinned her at either side tightened in; his knee shifted, nudging between her thighs. Lowering his head, Jason had only one retort. “Fine…Now, I’m finishing it.”
